“Probably I am spoiled,” she says, “but there are hundreds of others like me, though most of them are too human to resist sex temptation themselves. There are three types of people responsible for a vast number of girls like me: Mothers who spoil their daughters—anything rather than have them household drudges like themselves; society women who make the poor girl’s lot seem harder to her than she can bear; and the men who are glad to use the working girl for everything in life but marriage. Personally I am to blame, of course, but I consider myself swept by the current—glad to drift—yes; but afraid to think where it may end. I have never been in love. Something is still sleeping in me. Perhaps it will come to life some day.”[78] The last document is very significant. The girl’s schematization of life is further from the bordel and nearer the strategic form of marriage recommended by the wife in document No. 49 (p. 87). In none of the documents in this chapter up to this point is an unfortunate love affair or a betrayal with promise of marriage mentioned as the cause of later delinquency. Girls do make these representations, and very often, but they are always to be discounted, and for two reasons. In the first place girlhood and womanhood have been idealized to the degree that this explanation is expected and the girl wishes to give it. Betrayal is the romantic way of falling, the one used in the story books and movies. Many girls have finished stories of this kind which they relate when asked to tell about their lives. In addition, a seduction does usually accompany the first adventure into the world, as we have seen in the documents (Nos. 64–69), but we saw also that sex in these cases was used, as a coin would be used, to secure adventure and pleasure. On the other hand, not a few girls have tragedies in connection with courtship, promises of marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth which demoralize them when they had no previous tendency to demoralization. In a few cases girls yield to their own sexual desire. 72. Ellen is twenty years old. When her mother died six years ago her father immediately remarried and she went to an aunt in Poughkeepsie, but when her aunt found out she had broken connections with her father, she turned her out.... The aunt is an old maid living alone in a nice house, with one servant. She stayed with her one year. The aunt made it evident that she disliked Ellen. She did housework in Rochester, and then went to Poughkeepsie and later to Albany. She has worked as a maid, and as a salesgirl in a department store, but would not give the name nor any information regarding her employer.